I recently acquired an old copy of Alan Garner's Moon of Gomrath. I recognise that this name may not be a familiar one to readers. To my mind he is best described as an author of low fantasy, very heavily rooted in certain parts of the British countryside - not as in a generalised sense or spirit of a region, but as in very precise, real bits of Cheshire. If Tolkien is all languages and chronicles, Garner is archaeology and parish registers. I encountered him as a child (perhaps too young), but his works always seemed to need a little push to fully get, which I couldn't (wouldn't?) give*. (And I suspect that the business of adulthood and the effects of the internet mean that I never quite will get it.) Indeed, while I think he will still be praised by writers in (say) forty years, I wonder if he will be read or circulated in libraries. This is for reasons other than the usual declining literacy notions: there is something in Garner that probably only makes sense if you've been twelve and stayed in a cottage with no television and precious little radio reception in the middle of nowhere.
Anyway, you can compare and contrast all this to the various opinions collected on Wikipedia.
To return to The Moon of Gomrath. Two children, a brother and sister live on Alderley Edge. This is a sequel to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, which introduced them to the supernatural and fantastical. They don't quite literally 'save the world' but they have thwarted evil on a fairly grand scale. Is it implausible that so many of the great secret powers of the world should be tied to this bit of Cheshire? (How parochial, how nationalistic....) Implausible? Maybe, but that rather misses some of the point: without being too didactic, the notion that the battle between good and evil can be waged in your back garden should not be a surprising one.
Ignore the scene-setting: the main point is this. There is a passage when something that you might as well think of as the Wild Hunt is summoned up. This chapter has stuck with me, thrilled me for years (even as other bits of Garner didn't)**.
A sample:
'Wakeful are the sons of Argaton! Wakeful Ulmrig, Ulmor, Ulmbeg! Ride, Einheriar of the Herlathing!'
A breeze stirred the mist into dancing ribbons, and the flames trembled and it seemed that there was movement within them, and voices. 'We ride! We ride!' And out of the fire came three men.
Their cloaks were white, fastened with clasps of gold, and a whip was in the hand of each. Their hair was yellow, tight curled as a ram's head, and their horses white as the first snow of winter on the black mountain of the lean north wind.
Other such horsemen are woken:
'Wakeful is the son of Dunarth, north-king, mound-king! Wakeful is Fiorn in his hill! Ride, Einheriar of the Herlathing!'
'I ride! I ride!'
A lone figure came from the trees. His face as stern, heavy-browed, his beard plaited, two-forked, his mane black, awful, majestic. He wore a tunic of coarse hair without any cloak, and a round shield with five gold circles on it, and rivets of white bronze, hung from his neck. In his hand was an iron flail, having seven chains, triple-twisted, three-edged, with seven spiked knobs at the end of every chain. His horse was black, and gold-maned.
Another:
'Wakeful are the sons of Ormar! Wakeful Maedoc, Midhir, Mathramil! Ride, Einheriar of the Herlathing!'
'We ride! We ride!'
Their cloaks were blue as rain-washed day, their yellow manes spread wide upon their shoulders: five-barbed javelins in their hands, and their silver shields with fifth knobs of burnt gold on each, and the bosses of precious stones. They shone in the night as if they were the sun's rays. The horses' hoofs were polished brass and their hides like cloth of gold.
Well, there's the pattern.
Now, before I continue, allow me to say that I like and respect Garner's work.
Having said that, you know I'm now going to say something odd. Here it is: these are, on some level, silly. Even at the age of nine or so, I knew that a flail with than many chains was....unlikely. A five-barbed javelin might work, but seemed a bit unnecessary if not fishing for eels. It was thrilling, but almost a little stupid (and not in an OTT way, as depictions of Warhammer and chainswords). And all this set alongside Garner's other historical detail and sense of place. Even in the descriptions of the 'Einheriar of the Herlathing' the images of patterned shields with 'burnt gold' or 'white bronze' provide a note of solid, tangible grave goods out of the untracked past.
Note that most of the fantastical beings that carry weapons in Gomrath carry fairly ordinary swords and things. The Einheriar of the Herlathing are part of the 'Old Magic', deeper and wilder. So, part of their weapons and accoutrements is meant to show this: a five-barbed javelin is less a five-barbed javelin than it is an indication of some heaviness, some great mass of reality in them that can only be expressed by elaborate items and heavy colours. Don't confuse this approach with other things: it's different to 'The dread spectre held something that looked like a scythe'.***
Does this mean we should never see the Einheriar of the Herlathing? Now, obviously, the mind's eye will do its work here, and Garner has given a detailed description that could allow one to make an image of them. Indeed, they have. The copy I found is below.
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Cover image by George Adamson.
Laid out with the lovely Albertus (lovely until one gets to the ampersand, that is). |
And here is another cover that I recall in the local library.
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| This image found on Ebay. The cover to the Collins edition; I believe this is by David Wyatt - who I have learnt did any number of fantasy covers from my youth (I don't think that this is one of his best, but I do remember it - though happily, I'd forgotten that sparkly font for Garner's name). |
Anyway, I think that it will be agreed that the above depict A) Fiorn, mound-king and B) Maedoc, Midhir, Mathramil, the sons of Ormar. Working from my paragraph above on the 'thrilling but silly' nature of their descriptions and the meta-real (perhaps) idea of the horsemen and the hunt, I'm almost minded to suggest that you shouldn't try and depict these figures at all.
It's not that I believe it could never look good or right (though there's surely an element of that). Fantasy art has shown itself more than able over the last few decades to depict remarkable and elaborate arms and costume in a satisfactorily realistic, lovingly detailed way. Somewhere, there's no doubt an artist whose version of (say) the Horsemen of Donn utterly succeeds.
But would this flatten it? Undo it? Pin the drifting butterfly to the card? Collapse the wave function? Of course, given that I'm writing about this one chapter of a children's novel from the 1960s, the covers above haven't utterly undone or obliterated the worth of Garner's work. But I think it would be a mistake to film or animate Gomrath. Other books by Garner are fair game (and indeed have been adapted into television series).
To end: two things you can chew over. Firstly, are there any more uses of description like those above that you can picture? Secondly, is there anything else in fiction of this kind that you think really shouldn't be depicted? I recall a friend once saying that there should never be an attempted map of Gormenghast.
*I'd have never understood Red Shift if I had found a copy at the time.
** I wasn't thinking of it at the time, but if a recording angel of the celestial bureaucracy were to tell me that it inspired parts of The Orrery of Golems, I'd have little reason to doubt them.
*** To say nothing of the discussions one sees on the Wings of the Balrog.
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